Wednesday, 29 November 2006

Kul Wahad!

English can be a wonderfully expressive language. But sometimes you wish your first language were some other tongue... Like Arabic - which has the word khadhuf, meaning "a she-ass... so fat that, if a pebble is thrown at her with the fingers, or the two fore fingers, or with the extremity of the thumb and that of the forefinger, it sinks into her fat" (at least it does according to The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, edited by Robert Irwin).